1058 Joan w. Scot different schools of psychoanalysis to explain the production and reproduction of the subject's gendered identity. Theorists of patriarchy have directed their attention to the subordination of women and found their explanation for it in the male"need"to dominate the female. In Mary O'Brien's ingenious adaptation of Hegel, she defined male domination as the effect of mens desire to transcend their alienation from the means of the reproduction of the species. The principle of generational continuity restores the primacy of paternity and obscures the real labor and the social reality of womens work in childbirth. The source of women's liberation lies in"an Adequate understanding of the process of reproduction, an appreciation of the contradiction between the nature of womens reproductive labor and(male) ideological mystifications of it. 10 For Shulamith Firestone, reproduction was also the bitter trap"for women. In her more materialist analysis. however. liberation would come with transformations in reproductive technology, which might in some not too distant future eliminate the need for womens bodies as the agents of species reproduction. II If reproduction was the key to patriarchy for some, sexuality itself was the answer for others. Catherine MacKinnon's bold formulations were at once her own and characteristic of a certain approach: "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away cation is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality Man fucks woman; subject verb object. "12 Continuing her analogy to Marx MacKinnon offered, in the place of dialectical materialism, consciousness-raising as feminism's method of analysis. By expressing the shared experience of objectification, she argued, women come to understand their common identity and so are moved to political action. For MacKinnon, sexuality thus stood outsid ideology, discoverable as an unmediated, experienced fact. Although sexual relations are defined in MacKinnon's analysis as social, there is nothing except the herent inequality of the sexual relation itself to explain why the system of power perates as it does. The source of unequal relations between the sexes is, in the end, unequal relations between the sexes. Although the inequality of which sexuality is the source is said to be embodied in a"whole system of social elationships, "how this system works is not explained. 13 Theorists of patriarchy have addressed the inequality of males and females in important ways, but, for historians, their theories pose problems. First, while they otter an analysis internal to the gender system itself, they also assert the primacy of that system in all social organization. But theories of patriarchy do not show hor gender inequality structures all other inequalities or, indeed, how gender affects Mary OBrien, The Politics of Reproduction(London, 1981),8-15,46 i Shulamith Fi Politics of Reproduction, 8 e, The Dialectic of Sex(New York, 1970). The phrase"bitter trap"is O Brien's 12 Catherine McKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theor Sgs,7( Spring1982):515.541 3hid,541,53